The Key to Building and Sustaining Company Culture
Culture matters. In fact, we seem to be inundated with a consistent stream of content reinforcing how important it is to create a workplace environment that people are drawn to. Your culture can serve as the catalyst for encouraging people to want to come to the office each day, or the dynamic that helps your hybrid / remote environment truly thrive. Articles preaching the importance of culture are great, but one important variable often seems to be overlooked, the role of the manager. No executive team can simply map out a new direction and manifest an engaging company culture into being. That’s because your overarching environment is no more than the sum of a series of microcultures…all cultivated and directly influenced by entry and mid-level leaders.
Managers are the gatekeepers of organizational culture. They have the ability to reinforce your message, inspire their teams to get on board, and create advocates for the very environment you hope to create. On the flip side, they also have the ability to sabotage your aspirations and subtly work against the direction you’re trying to move your overarching workforce. Need some evidence? Consider research out of Gallup that suggests managers are responsible for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. In lay terms…that’s a lot. The quality of your managers matters.
Sure, there are steps you can take from a top down approach. You can create a dynamic vision, broadcast inspirational core values, and integrate all of that into your strategic plan. You can create an engaging message that encourages members of your team to see what your leadership team sees. But, if you’re not investing time, energy, and effort into developing your managers and ensuring they’re bought into reinforcing the workplace values and environment you aspire to maintain, you’re missing a critical step.
Think about it. Take a second to reflect on one of the worst managers you’ve had in your career. How did they make you feel? How did they make your team feel? Did they inspire you to put in extra effort, or go into more of a protective approach to your work? Perhaps working for them for a sustained duration prompted you to start looking for another role or led to the team giving voice to how frustrating work had become. There’s a good chance you started to talk to people outside of work about how frustrating your boss was as well. Problematic managers can undercut even the most dynamic work environment.
My formative years took place primarily in the 1980’s and I spent a lot of time watching the Smurfs. If you’ve seen any iteration of that cartoon, or one of the several films that have come out over the past few decades, you know their fictional village is an over the top, happy go lucky environment. That said, imagine that you worked in Smurf Village and your direct manager was Gargamel. Odds are your outlook on the whole operation is a lot less rosy than those who are on other teams. You simply cannot afford to tolerate managers who create countercultures that are not conducive to your organizational goals and values, particularly as they pertain to culture. Doing so will inevitably lead to good people eventually throwing up their hands and saying “smurf it…I’m out.”
Invest in developing your managers by incorporating accountability around culture and core values into all of your talent processes. Some organizations struggle with management accountability, but it’s a discipline you need to hone. This should include incorporating expectations as they pertain to culture and engagement into performance reviews, one on one conversations, and regular check-ins. If you’re not already leveraging an anonymous engagement platform to measure your teams’ sense of career wellbeing, consider doing that as well. When you’ve collected the information you need on manager effectiveness, leverage it to position your best leaders in roles where they can inspire as many people as possible. Meanwhile, reconsider the role and or fit for folks that can’t seem to shift out of Gargamel mode. Because let’s face it. Nobody wants to work for the town curmudgeon.
